I’m going to take a few minutes today to talk about laws. Not legal laws, like the speed limit, and not established laws of science, like the speed of light, but those aphorisms that people coin and consider to be so obvious that they’re practically indisputable but not so obvious that you can assume everyone already knows them.

Probably the most famous is Murphy’s Law, “If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible moment.”

Another famous one is Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The tech guy here at unscriptured, Fang, has some laws of his own, the newest of which came about because of a conversation that I had with God and was telling him about. God and I had been talking about how so many of the signs of people being in touch with him had been described away by advances in science. There were a number of examples, but I forget what most of them were. One though was that people hearing voices is often just due to schizophrenia.. The thing that God told me about that was simply that just because someone is schizophrenic it doesn’t mean the voices they’re hearing aren’t coming from God.

It struck me as rather like the old joke that goes, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. I found that comparison interesting enough that I told Fang about it. He grinned, went away and thought about it for a little bit, and then came back with his new law.

Before I tell you the new one, I suppose I should tell you about the two that he already had.

Fang’s First Law: “Those who do not learn from Science Fiction are doomed to repeat it.”

Then there’s Fang’s Law of Automation: “Any job that can be automated out of existence isn’t fit for a human to hold.”

And now, with a nod to Arthur C. Clarke, there’s Fang’s new law, Fang’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently unexplained natural phenomenon is indistinguishable from a miracle.”